Big Decisions

Today, I realized something.

I went out to the barn, cleared out Sasha’s stall, and got everything ready – she will calve soon, and I am really looking forward to milking. Weird, eh? I love my cow so much. I don’t even get it. I feel about her the way I feel about some of my best dogs. She has a personality and we partner together in the whole milking thing, and … well, and we eat her offspring, but somehow, in the whole bigger picture, that seems awesome, not awful and yukky.

Now the sheep …

I like the sheep, I do. They are cute. Some of them are friendly, others a little more skittish. There is nothing so adorable as lambs doing the sproinging thing around the pasture in the spring.

But sheep need much tighter fences than cows. I can put Sasha on a tie out and let her graze the ditches (true, I can do that with Cherub, one of the bottle fed lambs, now a grown ewe, but not most of the sheep). We like lamb, but mostly, we prefer beef. I love fibre arts, but I am just not in love with processing raw fibre.

And most of all, my resources are extremely limited.

I can’t get around to the feedings, the shearing, the vaccinations … I can’t do it all. The Boy has, thankfully, picked up most of the slack, but really, I can’t keep up.

I can keep up with a cow, though. In fact, I think I could keep up with two cows and a calf – I would like to have two dairy cows, who take turns being the one on milking duty, so I don’t have to worry about sending one off for breeding right in the midst of milking time … and we’d have a beef animal to put in the freezer every year. Only three or four animals to deal with at any one time, just a few vaccinations, no shearing, everyone halter trained and able to be tied out to eat or moved from one place to the other.

Today, I realized that I need to find another home for the sheep flock.

There are three that will stay – Lambie, Natalie’s last lamb, who we raised on a bottle and who just gave us a pretty little black ewe lamb named Jellybean, who would also stay, and Cherub, The Boy’s 4-H bottle lamb who nudges you to pet her every time you go outside. She’s such a character. They will stay.

Everyone else, though, needs to go to another home where there is grass and fences and space (and hopefully a guardian dog), someone who will happily shear them and delight in them.

I do love them. I just don’t have what it takes to be a good shepherd – I thought I would, but with the onset of PTSD? Nope. I don’t have the energy.

So … if you know anyone who’d like a lovely flock of fibre/meat sheep, send ‘em my way. There are five ewes (three of whom are still due to lamb – so nobody is moving anywhere until that’s done, that wouldn’t be fair), two rams (one of whom is the most beautiful and even tempered Icelandic ram you can ever imagine), and one wether … plus the two lambs on the ground so far, and probably three or six more to come.

I feel … well, I’m sad, but I also feel like it’s the right choice.

I’ll miss them, definitely. But the honest truth is, I’m not well enough to do all that’s needed to care for them. We’ve managed, we’ve done okay, but they need a different home.

Sigh.

Argh!

That was all melted and starting to turn green!!!

It's snowing again!

More Beautiful Than Before: the project is a go!

It’s official … the next book has reached the final draft and we are ready to move into production!

Because this book is available not just as a single, standalone book but also as part of a kit, the up front costs are a bit higher than with my previous projects, putting it a little beyond “oh, just put it on the credit card and we’ll pay it off as orders come in”.

As a result, we are using Kickstarter to accept preorders of the book (as well as other forms of sponsorship, all of which come with some kind of tangible reward, from a small download to an e-book up to and including a full kit and having your name on the acknowledgements page!).

What’s the book about? Well, here’s a look at the back cover:

You can find out more by following the link to Kickstarter and watching the video there, there’s also a full explanation of all the various ways you can support the project (and get your copy reserved!).

If you are interested in the one-day workshop based on this book, let me know! I’ll be ready to offer those by early summer. Just leave a comment below, ping me on Ravelry, or send me an email!

The Cold Never Bothered Me Anyway

If you haven’t yet seen Frozen, I highly recommend it. Even if you haven’t got kids. It’s got a lot of thought-provoking things to say: many of which seemed particularly relevant to me, like the idea that trying to control everything you feel is likely to lead to an unexpected eruption of power that hurts the people you are trying to protect, for instance. Like the idea that love, not fear, not control, is the answer to the pain and confusion.

I loved it. It’s also visually just stunning.

And when I saw that icy crystal gown, I knew there was a shawl design in there.

Some time with a spreadsheet and a bunch of beads and yarn resulted in this:

It has a lot of beads (close to 300), but it didn’t take all that long to knit, really.

The pattern’s up on Ravelry, if you need one of your own. The first fifty people to use the code LetItGo can have it for free. :D

The Hangover

I am writing this down because otherwise I am going to forget.

It’s really fun running on the adrenaline. I can do ALL THE THINGS! I am PRODUCTIVE! I feel so ENERGIZED! I love it. I feel like my old self.

Okay, some of the time I also feel jittery, and some of the time my chest hurts, but that seems a minor inconvenience, barely noticeable. Because I am GETTING STUFF DONE! And Getting Stuff Done is, somehow, ranked as the optimal state in my mind.

The thing is … the hangover.

I get all kinds of stuff done. I go and go and go and go … and yeah, in the evenings I have a bit of trouble getting unwound enough to sleep, and maybe I’m a little bit stiff if I’ve done a lot of standing or walking or whatever, and maybe I’m a little bit tense in the shoulders and ankles but it’s not really all that uncomfortable.

Until I stop.

I stop … and I still have momentum that carries me for another day or two. I came home from the festival and did all the unpacking and sorting the day after I got back, because I was simply not able to sit still, even though somewhere in my head I knew I was very tired … I couldn’t feel tired yet, or, even more strangely, I could feel it but at the same time I felt all wound up and unable to hold still. I went to BC, worked hard at the festival for three days, came home and unpacked everything, spent a day running errands, a day sorta resting, then spent two more days felting and demonstrating at the alpaca show – which was lots of fun – and came home and tidied the house and did some work on the computer and puttered around for another half a day because again, sitting still made me feel like I was coming out of my skin.

Eventually, I did sit. I got myself into the recliner yesterday afternoon and worked on my knitting – and made mistakes and had to take out five or six rows and do them over … and then made more mistakes and undid yet another row … but I did, finally, sit. My ankles were all tight (I will be sitting comfortably then look down to see my feet pulled up towards me, rather than just at rest … a sure sign of the increased muscle tension that is a part of PTSD – and, I have just realized, part of my body memory from the old trauma). When I got up to fetch more tea, I noticed how sore my legs and shoulders were, from all the standing and scrubbing of the previous two days. I could feel the weariness, the need for rest … and I could not get unwound enough to rest.

I took my medicine (although I forgot my evening dose and took it later than I should have), I took extra herbal sedation, and I was still awake, shuffling my feet and aimlessly roaming the halls of my brain until two in the morning.

I did sleep – though I dreamed of being chased through my old neighbourhood, hiding in an abandoned gas station, trying to protect a tiny old woman and her grandchild from some sort of evil men – and woke up around the usual time. I didn’t get any extra rest, but at least I got some. I’m staying in my pyjamas as a reminder to myself to take it easy today, and I will go back to my knitting.

But I need to remember how I got here, and what it feels like. Because next time I am tempted to be energetic, to push that rush of productivity and power, I need to remember what the hangover is like.

It’s uncomfortable. I could handle exhaustion – working hard and then being tired afterwards is a good feeling, that nice sense of having earned your rest. But I don’t feel tired, or like I have put in a good day’s work and now can sit back and relax … that’s just it, I can’t relax. Even my meds barely put a dent in the sense of being on edge, scattered, like there is something I need to be doing but can’t quite remember what it is, and even if I did remember, I’d be distracted from it by any shiny thought that happens to trip through my head and I’ll be off on another tangent in no time flat.

Face it: I’m a junkie. I’m hooked on the rush of energy I get from going hard, and like any junkie, I forget just how awful it is to come down from the hit. Worse, I don’t know what doses I’m getting, so I can’t calibrate my hits: my drug is invisible, unmeasured, immeasurable. How much is too much? How much is okay? What’s the not-hangover-inducing-acceptable dose of activity and stress?

Clearly the past two weeks are well over the limit and into overdose: a twelve hour drive followed by three days working on my feet followed by a twelve hour drive followed by a day of cleanup and sorting followed by a day of errands followed by a day of mostly quiet followed by two more days on my feet followed by a half day of doing stuff at home in an effort to unwind … right. Too much.

The five million dollar question is: how much of that could I have done without it costing me a hangover? Half of it? Any of it?

Maybe there’ll always be some amount of hangover when I am energetic. I certainly hope not … but right now, I just don’t know. Maybe what I have to figure out is how much hangover is a reasonable price to pay … a half day of the jitters followed by one evening where I need a bit of tincture in addition to my meds to kick me over into sleep … that’d be okay, I think. That doesn’t feel like it’d be doing any long term damage to the system, or piling up to push me over into the Darkness, as long as I don’t do it too often. But what’s too often? What’s enough?

I need to pay attention to how long this particular hangover lasts … I have some calibration to do.

I also need to talk to my care team about this … which is why I’m writing it all down. In the same way that the only true mystery of alcohol-induced hangovers is why anyone who has had one ever has another …  I need to figure out how to stop doing this to myself.

And how to stop it from being so damnably uncomfortable when I do.

Another hat

I finished the embellishment on the "Sunday go-to-meetin'" hat today ... A few more leaves and a pretty yellow button.

Then, over about 3 hours, I made the "Annie get yer gun" hat. :)

They could both do with a wee bit more fine shaping, easier to do at home where I have a sink with warm water at the ready, but they can be worn just as they are. Felting is so quick and fun!

The Alpaca People are planning a felting workshop later in the spring. That'll be fun too!

Wet Felting

You know, I actually like wet felting. It’s a lot of physical work (well, it can be, depending how big the thing is you are felting and how emphatic you have to get with the washboard) but the results are so unbelievably FAST and COOL.

I made this today at the Alpaca Show, at Northlands, in about two or three hours.

It’s straight-from-the-alpaca fibre, carded quickly just to fluff it open so the locks didn’t make the fabric too lumpy, embellished with some locks of different colours. There’s also a funky flower thing on the front which is made from a vessel that didn’t quite work out as planned – plain alpaca fleece embellished with some sparkly stuff I brought from home. I had no sewing tools with me today, but tomorrow I’ll stitch the leaves in place and probably add a button or two or three.

Fun day. More tomorrow!